The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  Again, he’d been wrong. He’d touched her, and now he wanted to draw her. The urge was both unfamiliar and bone certain, making his fingers grope down his thigh in search of the sketchbook he used to carry in his cammie pocket. Not there. But it was in the messenger bag. Carrying one was like the pain from a phantom limb. He didn’t draw like he used to, but he carried the sketchbook. After the IED went off, he put away the journal he’d carried, but found himself compulsively reaching for it, patting pockets, driving other Marines nuts with his unfamiliar restlessness. The LT took him aside and all but begged him to carry one. Not that one, Malone, you don’t have to carry that one. Another one. Please. We’re all skittish, all freaked, all grieving, and you’re making it worse. Just carry it.

  I can’t draw, LT.

  You don’t have to draw. Just put the goddamn thing in your pocket.

  He’d done it, shoved the old one he had carried to the bottom of his locker, put another one in his pocket. He felt like a kid with a pacifier, but it helped. He’d tap its stiff, comforting weight, and settle down, occasionally get out the sketchbook, flip through the cream pages, admire from some remote vista in his mind the emptiness, close it, put it away. For a while, looking at pages that weren’t saturated with blood was enough. But he never forgot about the sketchbook he hadn’t finished. It was now under the bed in the motor home. When he dragged Doug’s torso out of the Humvee, leaving one of his arms and both of his legs behind, Doug’s blood had soaked Seth’s cammies, run into his boots, bled into the sketchbook’s pages. The LT dragged him away from the Humvee, so Seth took it on faith that Manny’s and Brian’s blood was in the mix. God knew enough of it spilled into the dust and dirt.

  That’s when things went silent.

  Right now he could hear Arden’s heartbeat, her breath, the way it hitched up and up as pleasure coiled around them. Right now, he wanted to draw. He swung his leg over the bike and pedaled slowly up Ninety-second Street, used a break in traffic to cross Fifth Avenue to the Runner’s Gate entrance to Central Park, then sat down on a bench, pulled out the brand-new Moleskine and a Micron pen, and sketched her face and torso, glass of wine in hand when she realized the rent-boy game, all cheekbones, jaw, lips, the arch of her brows above her eye sockets, capturing the haunted look. It was as automatic as breathing, getting the essence of that moment when she was both haunted and turned on, a few lines, vague swirls for her hair. He’d need paint, or a metallic pastel, to fill in her suit, but this was the pose. Pale gold hair, gold suit, haunted eyes, sex mouth. That was Arden.

  He flipped the page, sketched in his hand against her sternum. Grease in his nail beds, the low curve of her bra cup, the ruffles of the suit. The notch between her collarbones. The scars on her shoulder and chest. She was wounded, and still in the fight.

  The fine gravel was pretty dry from the late summer heat wave. As a runner sprinted past, he kicked up tiny pebbles in his wake, and a bit of dust. Seth’s throat tightened, his heart rate spiked, and a sweat broke out down his back that had nothing to do with the late-summer humidity. His fingers spasmed, ruining the sketch with a jagged line, as if someone jostled his elbow. His eyes stung as he looked up, around, anywhere but at the drawing. A bloodbath of a sunset behind trees heavy with summer-dark leaves, the top of the stairs leading to the gravel path around the reservoir, joggers in all shapes and sizes crunching along, bikes speeding past him on the drive.

  Fuck this. Phil wasn’t canceling on him. He shoved the sketchbook in his bag, swung his leg over the bike and set off along the park’s winding paths to emerge on the West Side, where Phil lived with his mother. The red-brick buildings, spanning half a block, air-conditioners whirring in windows, the treatments different from apartment to apartment, felt substantial, real, after Arden’s narrow, otherworldly showpiece of an apartment. Still straddling the bike, Seth paused by the door and buzzed the Dorhaus apartment.

  “Yes?”

  “Ma’am, it’s Seth Malone. I’m here for Phil.”

  “Come on up,” she said.

  The door buzzed. Seth hauled it open, then disdained the elevator and took the close, warm staircase to the ninth floor. The smell of Hamburger Helper hung heavy in the hallway, the sound of a baseball game behind 9A, baby crying behind 9B, NPR behind 9C. Nine D was open. Seth knocked anyway, then stepped in to come face-to-face with Doug’s duffle bag, the contents strewn around the living room.

  His diaphragm spasmed. He expected the shrine, the folded flag in the triangular case under the boot camp graduation photograph of an unsmiling Doug, his brown eyes serious. He’d been with Doug when the picture was taken, joking around in their dress uniforms, self-conscious, proud. Young. Fuck, but they were young, then. Doug still had some baby fat on his face.

  Notched in the frame was a copy of the picture he tucked into the back pocket of every Moleskine he carried. He didn’t need to move to look at it more closely. He had it memorized, the broad grin on Doug’s face, Manny’s head tipped back in laughter, Brian’s hands on his hips, always the father figure despite being the youngest, and himself, head bent, his cheek creased with his smile. They wore filthy cammies, stood ready for patrol just outside Sangin.

  But the day-to-day reality of the contents of Doug’s seabag, dirty laundry, car magazines, toiletries, yanked the high right out from under him. This was the reality he had to stay in, a cramped apartment with a shrine, the loss hovering in the air, acrid and metallic all at once, like blood and the residue of explosives. Frozen in time. Arden’s world and apartment felt very far away.

  Phil leaned against the kitchen door frame, drying a plate with a dishtowel, his eyes giving away nothing. His mother came out from behind him, drying her hands on her apron. He’d last seen her at the funeral, and he should have been here before now. “Seth,” she said.

  He gave her an awkward hug. “How are you?” she asked, searching his face. She’d aged years, maybe a decade, in the past six months.

  “I’m fine,” he said. The standard bullshit. “Good. Keeping busy.”

  “Can I get you something?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, and threw Phil a hard look. “I’m here for Phil. We’re going to the movies.” God. There was his iPod, dust and dirt ground into the case, the connections of tangled earbud cord. He’d drawn Doug with those earbuds in a hundred times.

  “I don’t quite know what to do with all this,” Mrs. Dorhaus said, looking around the living room.

  “You don’t have to do anything with it, Ma,” Phil said.

  “I have to do something with it,” she said.

  “Do you want some help?” Seth asked gently, because the right thing to do was help her, steeling himself to do it.

  “No. You boys go out and enjoy yourselves,” she said. “I’ll just . . . put this away.”

  Seth left his bike in the hallway and waited while Phil closed the door. “She does this,” Phil said, his voice tight. “She unpacks the duffle, stares at all his stuff, then packs it up again. It’s like she thinks one day he’ll come home and unpack it.”

  He knew how she felt. Seth often found himself waiting for someone to check his body armor, or to even be breathing in the same space he was. “We could have stayed,” Seth said.

  “I can listen and remember all the good times we had together, and then I snap, can’t take it anymore. Basically, I’m fine until I’m not fine,” Phil said matter-of-factly. He looked at his watch. “I’m not fine now. We’ve got time to kill before the movie starts. Let’s hit the bar.”

  He followed Phil down Columbus to a nondescript neighborhood bar, and into the dim lighting. The outside didn’t look like much, but the interior was all right, booths along the back wall, stools at the bar, tables in between, and televisions in every corner. Two women sat in a booth at the back, not bothering to hide the way they were checking out Phil and Seth. Phil ordered a shot of whiskey and a beer. Seth stuck to beer.

  “How’s Britt?” Phil said in the tone of a man who knew the answer. />
  “What makes you think I’ve talked to her?” Seth said, trying to stall him.

  “Because I talked to her a couple of days ago, and she mentioned she got a new car. ‘How did you get a new car?’ I asked, because last time I checked she was living paycheck to paycheck waitressing at Ruby Tuesday’s and going to school while her mom watched Baby B. ‘Seth sent me the money,’ she said. ‘Seth,’ I said. ‘Seth who rides a bike in Manhattan and lives in a motor home?’ ‘Seth,’ she said.” Phil swallowed the rest of his beer, and signaled for another round. “Where the fuck did you get twenty grand?”

  Fuck. Busted. “I did a job for a guy,” Seth said.

  Phil’s face was comically astonished, visions of hit men or drugs dancing in his head. “You did a job? For a guy?” he repeated incredulously. “Cash under the table? What the fuck have you gotten yourself into? Twenty fucking grand?”

  Working as Ryan’s personal delivery service was nothing compared to being Arden MacCarren’s muse. “It’s not like that,” Seth said dismissively. “I delivered an orchid.”

  “Is orchid code for something? Weapons? Heroin?”

  “It’s code for a fucking pain-in-the-ass delivery. I rode as slow as I ever have, carrying that thing through Manhattan. Avoiding potholes is a bitch when you’ve got a three-hundred-dollar plant cradled in your arm. They’re fragile.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  He’d put a few things together since he met Arden, paid a little more attention to the world she lived in, the world Ryan came from. Ryan was throwing money around for a reason, and it had something to do with being the whistleblower on the MacCarren Ponzi scheme. “I deliver a lot of flowers and food. Rainy nights, no one wants to go out and pick up two buck chuck and wontons at Trader Joe’s. This guy had the kind of money where twenty grand was like five bucks to you or me. He wanted me on standby for the summer.”

  “That’s not normal. Normal people don’t make those kinds of offers, and people in their right fucking minds don’t take them,” Phil said. “That’s movie shit. That’s mob or gang shit.”

  “It wasn’t the mob,” Seth said. “It was Wall Street. Britt needed a new car. I sent her the money so she could buy one. All it would take to derail her was the transmission on that shitty Escort going out on her. Now she’s got a fighting chance at finishing school. Which is what Brian wanted for her.”

  Phil opened his mouth but what came out was a girlish, flirty “Hi.”

  Seth turned to see the girls from the table, holding their cocktail glasses, smiles as bright as the shiny fabrics they wore. “Hi,” he said. Phil shut his mouth.

  “I’ve got that,” she said to the bartender, thrust her credit card between them, then tapped the globe and anchor on Phil’s forearm. “Thanks for your service.”

  “Thanks,” Phil said easily, and tossed back the shot. Seth couldn’t read Phil’s reaction. As far as he knew, Phil wasn’t seeing anyone. His last girlfriend didn’t last the deployment.

  “I’m Amber,” the talkative one said, and held out her hand.

  “Carlie,” the other one said.

  Handshakes all around, then the drinks arrived and they clinked glasses.

  “How long have you been home?”

  “A couple months,” Phil said.

  “Few months,” Seth said, when she and her friend turned expectant eyes on him. There were rules for situations like this, and rule number one was Don’t ruin your buddy’s chances. He settled in to play wingman. A few minutes of conversation established that the girls both worked in retail. They displayed equal curiosity about Seth’s bike messenger work and Phil’s status as a college student.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m in the general studies program at Columbia,” Phil said.

  Eyes brightened, eyebrows lifted, a little laughter.

  “It’s pretty boring compared to bike messenger work,” Phil said. “You should see him ride.”

  Seth flicked a look at Phil. He didn’t need Phil deflecting attention from himself to Seth.

  “Are you going to school, too?”

  “Not right now,” Seth said. He could see their thoughts spinning like a slot machine, trying to match up attraction and the lure of danger with future employment prospects. Being a bike messenger was great for one-night stands, not so great for anyone thinking about white picket fences or an apartment in Manhattan.

  “He finished his degree while we were in the Corps,” Phil said, once again turning the attention back to Seth. “And he’s an artist.”

  No joy. Being an artist fell into the same category as bike messenger. Great for sex, no future prospects measurable in dollars and sense. “Were you in the same unit?”

  “Nope,” Phil said.

  Seth opened his mouth to head this off, because he could see the train barreling down the tracks at top speed, but he had literally no idea what to say. Talking to Arden was so much easier than this.

  “How do you know each other?”

  “He served with my brother,” Phil said, jerking his thumb at Seth.

  “Is your brother still in the Marines?”

  “He died.”

  And there it was, the crash, the smiles disappearing, the eyes widening. Shock was universal, and so easy to draw. “God. I’m sorry. Wow. That’s awful. Um . . .” One of those girl-communication glances, and they both went to the restroom.

  “What the hell?” Seth said.

  Phil slugged back the rest of his beer. Based on the total lack of tact on Phil’s part, Seth wondered how early he’d started drinking. “Doug’s dead, so I’m wounded. There’s a certain type that likes that. The good news for you is that those two prefer healthy former Marines. You should go for it.”

  “No way,” Seth said. “We had plans.”

  “The movie will be showing tomorrow, or next week,” Phil said. “Go ahead. I’m telling you I don’t mind.”

  “I’m not ditching you,” Seth said.

  The conversation happened low and fast, finishing just as the girls emerged from the restroom, freshly tousled and lipsticked. All Seth could see was Arden’s pale gold hair and violet eyes, the lush pink of her mouth after she kissed him until he forgot everything.

  “We’re going to a party in Tribeca,” Amber said. “Want to come along?”

  “I’ve got to get going,” Phil started.

  “No thanks,” Seth said, cutting him off. “We’ve got plans. Nice to meet you. Thanks for the drinks.”

  “What the fuck?” Phil said when he and Seth were standing on the sidewalk. “You got a girlfriend I don’t know about?”

  “Do you?” Seth shot back.

  “I didn’t mind when the dress blues got me laid. I mind a hell of a lot when wounded does.”

  Seth got that, the penetrating stares, the soft, tender looks, invisible pets and strokes. Well intentioned. Useless.

  “Jesus. Girls buying us drinks, inviting us to parties, and we walk away. Doug would be so pissed at us.”

  Seth huffed out a laugh. “Yeah.”

  Phil shoved his hands in his jeans pockets and hunched his shoulders. “There’s this wall between me and the rest of the world. I know what I’m supposed to do. I just don’t want to do any of it. If I do the things I’m supposed to do, like go out and drink with girls, I lose it.”

  “Lose what?” Seth said.

  “Time, mostly. There’s about seven hours from Tuesday night I don’t remember. I remember being in a bar on the Lower East Side. Then I woke up in some strange girl’s apartment, hungover, still high, and wearing fuck-all. I had no idea where the fuck I was. I had to use the GPS on my phone to find my location.”

  Jesus. Seth stared at him. He was supposed to be looking out for Doug’s younger brother. Scenarios spun through his head, mostly about the kinds of diseases you could get from sharing needles or having unprotected sex. “Jesus,” he said finally. “Phil. What kind of high?”

  “Pot. I’m not stupid.”

 
; “You don’t remember seven hours,” Seth retorted.

  “No one else brings him up,” Phil said, bringing to the surface what had been lurking in the depths all along. “Mom says it’s like she only had one son.”

  Seth could only imagine how Phil felt. He’d lost friends, brothers, but not like Phil, who’d idolized Doug, spent his whole life trying to live up to his older brother just as intensely as Doug praised him, guided him, mentored him. He shoved his hands in his pockets, said nothing, because there was nothing to say. Being here would have to do.

  Phil looked at him out of the corner of his eye, then looked at his watch. “Can we just go to the fucking movies and not think about it?”

  They looked at the electronic marquee over the ticket booth a little while later, considering a list of romcoms, family dramas, cartoons with talking squirrels, and by unspoken agreement avoiding the action movies packed with explosions. Hollywood used the worst day of his life as entertainment. They settled on a bromance comedy; Seth bought the tickets, Phil bought the popcorn and sodas. “You realize everyone’s going to think we’re dating,” he said, as they settled into their seats.

  Seth shrugged and claimed his soda. “Nothing wrong with that,” he said.

  “You seeing anybody?” Phil asked before cramming a handful of popcorn in his mouth.

  Seth thought about Arden, drenched in gold, her tumbled, witchy hair. He thought of the way she got more real when he drew her, the angle of her jaw he’d felt under his palms now a fine line in his sketchbook, and deep into his soul. He thought of the arrangement they’d made, what he’d unwittingly confessed, just so she wouldn’t be alone in her need.

  “No,” he said, and put her out of his mind.

  – TEN –

  A few days after the humiliating baby shower, Arden swallowed the last of her coffee, rinsed the mug, and went back upstairs to dress for the first trip back to the MacCarren Foundation offices since the day the FBI raided her family’s homes and offices. She chose her outfit carefully, a tailored pantsuit in black with a stark white blouse underneath, the collar high enough to hide the faint bite mark on her neck. Her hair she left loose, then tucked into a twist, then simply brushed back in a low ponytail. Lipstick to give her face some color. Big pearl earrings that were a Christmas present last year, the heirloom pearl necklace her grandmother gave her on her sixteenth birthday. More slowly, she slipped on her watch, then the ruby ring she customarily wore on the middle finger of her right hand.